XBian's Koenkk Replies To the XBian/RaspBMC Flap

New submitter juenger1701 writes "Xbian's developer Koenkk has posted a reply to the code stealing accusations mentioned here Friday." In response, Sam Nazarko of Raspbmc has replaced his earlier complaint, "on the agreement that XBian participate with compliance of the GPL." Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.

Comments

Youngins.

[girlintraining]

Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.

Many moons ago, when the internet was young and fresh, and wild UNIX admins roamed freely, there was a thing called Usenet, and on this thing called Usenet, was a relatively new problem called Spam. And much of this Spam came from a particular ISP. And as Usenet back in those days was a community-run entity, there was much discussion about how to resolve this problem. E-mails sent to the ISP were met with silence, or with "not our problem." And the Spam continued. One day, after there had been a much-heated debate, a vote was held, and it was declared the ISP (AT&T), would be given the ultimate punishment: The Usenet death sentence.

It was rarely carried out, and even the elders recall only a handful of times when an ISP had earned its place amongst the killfiles of the wild UNIX admins of old. And so the call went out: At midnight, the killfiles would be updated, and AT&T would be purged henceforth from the world of Usenet. And word of this spread, and yet the giant still slumbered, refusing to do anything. And it was seen that the death sentence was good, and so all waited for it to come to pass.

Suddenly, in the final minutes of the final hour, an e-mail appeared from the beligerant ISP! It read, simply, "We do not have a problem, and we are working as quickly as possible to fix it." And thus was it seen for the first time on the internet how corporations deal with these sorts of problems. And ever since, whensoever a cry went up in an internet community that called for the end of access for a corporation, thus has been the response... by tradition, only uttered in the final minutes, of the final hour.

Re:Youngins.

[jd]

Actually, USENET was middle-aged when those Utah lawyers posted the first mainstream spam. (And the more serious crime was their publishing a book on how to exploit the Internet to harvest personal data and spam them.)

AT&T should have been terminated, not just by USENET but by the MBone and maybe even some of their Tier 1 peers. Not just until they did something, but permanently. Some crimes should not be forgiven, and AT&T's actions then have cost the world on aggregate since that time (bandwidth ain't cheap, neither is storage) far more than the market value of AT&T. This was anticipated and widely expected to be the outcome of AT&T's negligence. Sometimes, the best option is to cut your losses and run, and AT&T was definitely a loss.

Today, such action would serve little purpose. Spam, which is essentially economic cyberwarfare, has become too widespread. You can't dig it up by the roots, there are too many of them. It will require action on a far larger scale. System admins, network admins and ISP admins alike will have to become the largest gang of herbicidal maniacs ever gathered in one virtual spot. Exterminating botnets, the ultimate weed, will require a change in attitudes. Provider agreements must make spamming grounds for terminating Internet access. System admins must monitor their systems more rigorously for evidence of compromise. Network admins must stop assuming they can just get away with a trivial spam filter then ignore the problem. Spam is a reduction of service, rather than a denial of it, but then in a DDOS, so is each individual component of that attack. Network admins wouldn't be caught dead regarding components of a DDOS as something they can just ignore. Same's true here.

Complication of making a distribution

[Bruce Perens]

Making a distribution is more complicated than just making it work technically. There's a substantial amount of work in making sure that you're complying with all of the licenses, both in software that you just distribute, and the software that you write but combine with other people's work.

So far, the communications I see on this issue don't come from people who appear to understand all of what they're required to do. And the licenses used by these folks on their own work aren't even close to Open Source.

I think this community needs to go back to the Debian core it started with, and add to that whatever optimizations and installers are necessary without the crayon licenses.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[sumdumass]

Xbian and raspbmc are competing distributions of operating systems for the rasbery pi .(you can google rasbery pi).

Well, I say operating systems but they seem to be more or less flash utilities and scripts to change some settings and load debian linux from a debian repository somewhere. The quip seems to be over the installer program in which something was claimed to have been copied without attribution to the copyright holders or provisions in the GPL for redistributing the source.

Both projects seem to be run by kids which is really evident if you caught any of the back and forth banter over the last couple of days. I'm not really sure why this makes the front page of slashdot. Maybe I borked some settings or something.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[tibit]

While I don't think that projects run by kids are anything to scoff at just because they are run by kids, indeed there's some degree of immaturity shown in the response page on xbian.org. The response repeatedly shows that the author is wholly ignorant of how copyright laws work. Namely that the installer author is the only one responsible for compliance. Those xbian folk seem to have no clue that if they redistribute, it's on THEM to comply. I think evein I knew that back in the 90s, without otherwise having a clue about copyright law, from nothing more than reading the fine license (GPL) and associated narrative (FAQs, mailing list posts).